Getting It Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget

The ideas upon which public education was founded in the last half of the 19th century were wrong. Despite their continued dominance in educational thinking for a century and a half, these ideas are no more right today. So argues Kieran Egan, an educational theorist, in this study. Kieran Egan explains how we have come to take mistaken concepts about education for granted and why this dooms our attempts at educational reform. Egan traces the 19th-century sources of Progressive thinking about education and their persistence even now. He diagnoses the problem with our schools in a radically different way, and likewise prescribes novel alternatives to present educational practice. This volume seeks to be both persuasive and full of promise.